


what spring is like

by scramjets



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Break Up, Gen, Lounge Singer Jim Kirk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 23:11:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8553319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scramjets/pseuds/scramjets
Summary: The conclusion of a marriage.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This happened because [Chris Pine singing Fly Me To The Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAoQgFJbaBM) exists. And is amazing. You should definitely watch it :D. All the thanks to Neko and Fin for cheerleading!

*

Their marriage had taken place in the backyard gardens of Jocelyn’s parents. It had rained for the first time in an age on that day, soft at first, beading on the leaves and flowers and grass, until it gathered to a downpour and they had to cram the entire party into the tiny living room of the Darnell’s. McCoy didn’t care. He would’ve happily married Joce in a barn with the horses as witness. And it’s good luck his Nan told him, her hands tight around his, her words bowed under the weight of her accent and pride: _Rain on the wedding day is good luck, Len_.

It’s the first thing to mind as McCoy hands his car keys over to the valet, as he takes in the size and scope of the restaurant while standing at the foot of the stairs with the plush red carpet soft under his shoes.

He’s guided to his table where Jocelyn waits. It’s easy to tell that she’s just as out of place even though she’s dressed the part in something off-the-shoulder and with diamonds at her throat. He recognises it in the too-straight line of her back and how her attention doesn’t settle, jumping from the chandeliers that drip crystal to the golden filigree that lace up the wall. The sparse country is too deep in their bones to ever feel at peace in a place like this.

McCoy slips into his chair, apologises for being late and Jocelyn tells him that it’s fine. She says with her accent curiously flat and she takes a sip of her wine and ignores the look he gives her, and it’s silence until their orders are taken, and silence again when the waiter disappears with them.

Jocelyn takes it upon herself to break it, clearing her throat to ask how was work and McCoy tells her work was fine without offering anything further because she has voiced on more than one occasion that she can’t handle what he goes through in the trauma ward; she can’t deal with him bringing any of that back. It’s understandable. He gets it. McCoy leaves it at that and follows the rest of the script asking, how was yours? And she says it was fine, and then it’s silence again.

The entrees come on warmed plates and they eat in that same silence as McCoy considers the rigid line drawn between them because he still remembers when they used to share everything: spoons, cups, forks, a bed.

Jocelyn sets her cutlery together on the plate when she’s done and sits back with her hands on her lap when the waiter removes the plate from the table. She tips a smile up at him and it disappears the moment he does too.

We need to talk, she says.

And there it is.

McCoy’s Nan hadn’t been set on God’s green earth to raise a fool, but it still feels as if his insides have been scooped out and had left behind the thin hollow shell of him. This was where the entire night was leading up to -- and it’s perfect, isn’t it? The restaurant. The jewelry.

He’d asked her to marry him a decade ago. Like now he had been seated across from her. Not in a restaurant like this, hell there wasn’t even a restaurant. None of this, just McCoy’s heart in his throat and the grit of sand on the floor that had come in with the breeze; the faint smell of fuel from the pick-up.

It had been the end of a long full day and he’d been nursing the question a while, testing the weight of it in his head, and he’d turned to her and asked, and she had stared long enough for him to want to take it back before she’d said yes. He thinks of the heat that had gone through him, the love that had felt too big and overwhelming in his chest spilling out, and he’d kissed her, framed her face with his hands, the radio playing low in the background as he loved her in that raw earnest way for what felt like hours.

The soundtrack to this evening though is the dulcet of a piano playing the same pleasant drivel that leaks out the phone when he’s set on hold to the electricity company. It settles over the hum of restaurant noise to inoffensively take up space.

McCoy takes a mouthful of wine, sets the glass back to the table too fast and hard he expects the stem to shatter and stares when it doesn’t. The liquid in the glass is unsettled, edging up and down the sides. Someone in the room laughs, a loud _ha ha ha_ , that claws its way through McCoy’s thoughts and it brings him back to where Jocelyn’s still waiting, and so he says, yeah darlin’, letting the _n_ drag itself along the ground. Her mouth tightens.

There’s an unpleasant crackle of static and then a sheepish voice over the speakers. McCoy glances to the dais where the piano sits off to the side of the room. The man speaking wears a wry smile.

“Sorry about that everyone,” he says. The mid-western twang to his voice is incredible. He adjusts the microphone and settles on the piano chair. He tests a few notes, lets them melt into the air as he continues to talk, “This one goes out to Janice Rand and Carol Marcus, congratulations ladies. All the best for the years to come.”

McCoy grits his teeth and swivels back to Jocelyn. The applause and the cooing from the audience comes like rain on a tin roof -- loud and inescapable, all-compassing and impossible to ignore, and it’s all McCoy hears until the piano begins again, picking up the same elevator tune where it had let off. There’s a liveliness to it this time, a thread of something through the notes that eventually shift into the recognisable, and for a moment McCoy’s back at his grandparents on their farm, the smell of dry grass and packed earth coming through the open veranda door, a hint of rain behind that, and his Pop had put on a record and asked his Nan to dance. The memory comes with a visceral ache and the almost desperate want to be there. Back when he’d been naive enough to believe in loving someone forever.

Jocelyn says his name and McCoy starts in his seat. He almost startles again when he realises the waiter is back with their mains. He stares at the food in front of him, the wide round plate and the arranged heaping of his meal at its centre. He goes through the process of eating without registering the individual aspects of it.

Through it all the piano continues. The notes drift from the dais as smooth and as rich as some of the finest whiskey McCoy has sampled. They settle against him, comfortable and familiar in a way, and it’s only then that he notices that the music is accompanied by singing -- and he looks back to the elevated stage and the grand piano on it, the glossy black surface shining white where the fixed lighting falls directly on its surface. The pianist is dark blond and wears a tux, and his expression is caught between self-awareness and pleasure as he sings, like he’s not used to the attention, but he loves what he does enough to bear it.

McCoy swallows and turns back to the table. To Jocelyn and his evening meal. The kid at the piano isn’t Sinatra. The thought swims through McCoy’s head like it wants to be mean, like it wants to be petty where he can’t be to Joce. Because no, the kid isn’t, but there is something there anyway, in his voice and what he has seen of his face, and it hooks low in McCoy’s belly -- warms him where everything at the table does not.

Jocelyn tells him that she wants out. It’s said in better words than that, but it amounts to the same: I don’t want this anymore.

Okay, he says.

That’s fine, he tells her.

He finishes his wine and lets the waiter top it up. He clears that one too as he wonders if he should be angry or sad. One of his work colleges had only come through the other end of a divorce, and McCoy had seen how the marriage had torn apart with the sort of violence that would’ve been described as passionate had it been love. Catalano had dragged himself to work with bags heavy under his eyes, the tight lines of his body lashing down the grief that had seeped through the cracks anyway.

McCoy figures he’s in shock, and that the realisation will eventually wear through it and crush him in a single devastating moment. And it’ll probably happen while he’s doing something inane like shopping, and he’d have to be escorted out for weeping over the bread.

Jocelyn exhales. Her hands are tight on her cutlery, fist closed around the handle of her knife like it’s a weapon instead of a tool. God, he needs something stronger than wine.

 _Fill my heart with song,_ the kid croons. His voice rolls over McCoy like water on the shoreline, like he’s standing knee deep in the surf with the tide rushing against his legs, coaxing him into the open sea. And he’d follow, he would. _And let me sing forever more._

I’m taking the house, she says.

_You are all I long for._

The car.

_All I worship and adore._

The art.

And it’s strange how he can hear what she’s saying, hear the honey-smooth of the kid’s voice over the high-pitched ringing in his hears. She doesn’t even like the damn artwork and she wants it.

That’s fine, McCoy says. Jocelyn visibly relaxes. She drops her hands to her lap and breathes, expelling the built-up nerves because while he’s long since learned that it’s easier not to fight, she’s steeled herself anyway.

Sorry it had to be like this, she says. Gentle now. I only ever wanted--

McCoy drains what little is left in his wine glass. If she’d finished her sentence he must have missed it, but he figures it wasn’t important because she’s done what she’s come to do and so nothing else needs to be said.

 _In other words_ , the kid goes. This part of the song McCoy knows. It's his Nan’s favourite song so of course he knows, and he concentrates on the richness of the kid's voice, the polish of his baritone that, for a heartbeat, feels like it's aimed at him and if there's anything worthwhile coming from this night, it's that.

 _In other words. I love you_.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come say hi on Imzy!](https://www.imzy.com/kirk_mccoy)


End file.
